Jammer's Reviews

Articles & Miscellaneous

Jammer's Blog

I also write a blog at JammersBlog.com. It's the sister site of Jammer's Reviews; if you like my reviews, you might also like the blog. Articles that might previously have been posted in this section instead now go in the blog. Topics include reviews and discussion of other television, movies, pop culture, and things that either annoy me or that I like. It do what it do.

Essays, Columns, Features

4/25/2006. We've Moved and Stuff — Star Trek: Hypertext is no more. And this time, it's not April Fool's Day. New name, new server, new independence.

3/22/2005. One Decade and Counting — We've been here for 10 years, believe it or not. Damn, I'm getting old. I promise not to be sentimental about turning 10.

1/3/2005. Wake Me Up, Scotty— I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. To be honest, I'm not sure where we are. Somewhere between insomnia and madness. Like Ed Norton in Fight Club.

2/20/2004. Confessions of a Closet Trekkie— Jammer has issues, man. Serious issues. And he cops to everything in this epic exclusive expose. Documents situations ranging from movie theaters to Super Bowls to Italian fast-food restaurants.

1/8/2004. Return of the AnyKey — Or "At Death's Door, Part II" You just can't keep a good Gateway 2000 keyboard down. Especially when they're built like tanks.

10/14/2002. At Death's Door — It's dying, and there's nothing I can do. Can it be saved? Or is it destined for the trash bin? What will I ever do? Ah, melodrama.

4/26/2000 and 7/7/2000. Jammer Goes to L.A. — A report on my trip to Los Angeles to pitch a few story ideas to Star Trek: Voyager. Spoiler: I didn't sell any stories, but I did make L.A. my bitch.

3/7/2000. Five Years on the Web — Five years, and we're still here. Take a look at some of this site's backstory. And to think I'll have to write something like this every five years.

8/10/1999. The Franchise's Future — My segment of a multi-writer series, with some thoughts on what lies ahead in Trek's future. (Originally published at TrekNation.com)

2/21/1999. A Tribute to Gene Siskel (1946-1999) — Remembering a man who, along with the indispensible Roger Ebert, helped bring film criticism to the mainstream of America.

12/8/1997. Four Series and the Trek Ideology — An in-depth look at the Star Trek ideals and success as conceived through four different Star Trek series. Warning: Written for a general non-Trek audience.

2/3/1997. Clarity Needed in Viacom-Induced Web Mess — A followup post to "Viacom's Web Assault." Like with the FCC, it would be nice to know ahead of time what's permissible and what's not, but what ya gonna do?

12/23/1996. Viacom's Web Assault — One of my early rants about copyright issues, when Viacom was shutting down certain fan site. They never shut me down, though. So HA!

1/24/1995. Trek's Musical Problems — Music on Star Trek in the mid-1990s was too muted for my tastes. Here's some venting on the subject. (Originally posted on rec.arts.startrek.current)

Television

2/28/2007. CNN Is a Joke — A month after Anna Nicole's Smith's death, CNN is covering the "story" like tabloid whores. Here's a news flash: Smith is no longer "breaking news." Get a clue, CNN.

8/9/2005. Review: Too Late With Adam Corolla — Also known as, how to fill half an hour with two minutes of content. To think that this show once occupied the spot now filled by The Colbert Report. Amazing.

3/4/2004. Hey, Promo Guy: You're Fired — For the love of God, find a new way to advertise your shows, NBC. Using the same clip for an entire season is lazy and lame.

3/4/2004. Review: America's Next Top Model — Jammer takes a critical, in-depth look at this UPN reality series focusing on the subtleties of the fashion industry. And when we say in-depth, we mean in-depth.

8/15/2003. Summer of Serialization — Nothing new in prime time, so I turn my attention to The Wire and The Sopranos. Two great shows that know better than to air on broadcast networks.

6/30/2003. Busey's With Dumbass — "I'm With Busey," and especially that awful Adam guy, needs to go away. Far, far away from any television set anywhere.

3/12/2003. Why I Hate the Fox News Channel — Watch as political commentary becomes a witless bar fight. Seriously, I blame the sorry, divisive state of political dialog in this country on the likes networks like Fox, which prefer fighting to listening.

3/24/2001. Pandering Fails to Capture X-treme Audience — If "Temptation Island" was a success, at least I can take comfort in the XFL sucking it up. This is the kind of disaster that happens when a network loses its sanity after losing all its NFL contracts.

1/8/2001. Network TV's New Pandering Low — Great, just what we needed: a reality show called "Temptation Island." I say we vote all these loser onto an island and force them to stay there.

Movies

6/10/1998. Dark City — A skillful exercise in style and aesthetics from Alex Proyas, director of The Crow. With this film Proyas also manages to go beyond pure mood by supplying a more fundamentally challenging story.

6/10/1998. Event Horizon — Mediocre sci-fi thriller with a script that seems to enjoy posing interesting questions only to answer them with uninteresting horror cliches, frequently borrowing from other genre pictures.

11/10/2014. Interstellar — Haunting, epic science fiction in the true sense of the term, focusing on ideas and feelings alongside each other.

5/20/2003. The Matrix Reloaded — The much anticipated followup to the 1999 original is a superb sci-fi extravaganza featuring some truly inventive action sequences and a story that offers tantalizing puzzles and possibilities.

11/20/2003. The Matrix Revolutions — The disappointing conclusion to the Matrix trilogy cannot live up to the mysteries set up in the previous installments, and instead becomes a titanic battle between the One and his opposite. Visually impressive but not satisfying on a story level.

6/10/1998. Sphere — A film with an ambition that proves to be its own downfall. Whenever it starts to work on one level, it grows untenable on another.

1/20/2000. Supernova — Truly bad sci-fi. Not simply a recycling of predictable sci-fi genre cliches but a very badly executed movie that lacks any sense of coherence, drama, suspense, or competence.

7/7/2000. Titan A.E. — Begins and ends with dramatic special-effects sequences that rouse some genuine emotions, but in between are many moments where the plot chugs along the formula lines. A fairly entertaining comic book that's adequate but could've been much more daring and memorable.

6/28/1998. The X-Files — Entertaining movie that captures the essence of what works with The X-Files (atmosphere, intrigue) without belaboring its plot. Strangely, it works equally well as a standalone movie or an inconclusive piece of the broader X-Files mythology.

"The Deeper Side of Trek" column series at Space.com

11/7/2000. Franchise at the Crossroads — The way I see it, Trek resides in a strange place it hasn't been in since The Next Generation was facing a launch marked with optimism but also uncertainty: There's concern that a new direction may not be successful.

10/5/2000. Dogs of War — Trek has not escaped war. Instead of extinguishing war, the Federation has applied it to new frontiers.

9/19/2000. Technobabble — I'd like to single out a specific subset of Federation society that we can't fully comprehend: the technology.

9/1/2000. Galaxy of the Elite? — I've been through the Star Trek canon and back, and I've found that the visible Trek universe (or at least the parts where humans live) is a pretty elite place. Where are the plumbers? Blue-collar factory workers? People performing manual labor? Do they exist in the 23rd and 24th centuries?

8/17/2000. The Movies — Not surprisingly, some important chapters in Star Trek emanate not only from the small screen, but also from the big one, in the form of feature films.

8/3/2000. Defining a Franchise — It's a safe bet to say not everyone is intimately familiar with Star Trek and its various spin-offs, but is there anyone with any knowledge of mainstream American entertainment who hasn't at least heard of it? I tend to doubt it.